The Queen Running Out of Too Much Money!

Italian daily La Repubblica reports that Queen Elizabeth II (pictured left in a chair so old it's practically falling apart) has asked the British Parliament to increase her royal stipend, drawn from the Civil List, as she fears that she may soon no longer have far too much money for one person. Her worries were sparked by the fact that the savings she had built up over the past 20 years have dwindled to almost nothing, due to her chronic inability to spend within the enormously ample means afforded by the placid, uncomplaining, increasingly poor British taxpayer.

Her Civil List is intended primarily to cover the cost of her personal assistants and servants, and clocks in at about £7,900,000 a year. This is quite apart from the money which goes towards preserving the luxuriant excess of the monarchy as a whole, which costs about £41,000,000, and includes maintaining the palaces of Windsor, Buckingham and Balmoral.

The Queen claimed that she was forced to dip into her savings to the tune of £6,000,000 a year because nearly £8m did not cover the costs of the parties and ceremonies she wished to hold. Let's also not forget that the Queen's fantastic wealth is buttressed by personal earnings she accrues from her vast land and farm holdings.

Queen Elizabeth II asked for her Civil List provisions to be expanded in the 1990s, as well, but this was refused her. It seems she's chosen the financial crisis as the perfect time to reiterate her request not out of any real need for money, but to gleefully remind the struggling British taxpayer how unsoundly rich she is, and to spark a public debate that will let everyone know that eight million pounds is simply not enough for her, her parties, and her platoon of corgis (one of which pictured above, being boarded onto a plane swaddled in cloths probably more costly than a misdiagnosed mole.)

A Very Silly Decision Overruled

The USA's Supreme Court yesterday threw out one of the sillier judgements made concerning racial discrimination when it overturned Sonia Sotomayor's (Obama's pick for the Supreme Court) ruling in the case of Ricci v. DiStefano. The details of the case, if you haven't already read, concern white and hispanic firemen who are angry that the New Haven fire department annulled the results of a test to determine promotions solely because no black candidate passed. Sotomayor's ruling was that the fire department was justified in annulling the results of the test, because even though the test was not intended to discriminate, it ended up having a “disparate impact” on the black firemen.

The reversal of this silly and politically motivated ruling is a welcome departure from the USA's traditionally snivelling strategy of dealing with racial inequality. 5 out of 9 Supreme Court judges rightly concluded that “The city was not entitled to disregard the tests based solely on the racial disparity in the results.”, highlighting the overt discrimination inherent to the fire department's actions and Sotomayor's ruling. These judges, mislabelled as “conservative”, thus struck against the crux of positive discrimination: the 1964 Civil Rights Act's text on “disparate impact”.

The idea here is that if in any situation a minority (usually blacks) are not performing exactly as well or better with regards to their white counterparts, then regardless of the intention or the fairness of the test, “disparate impact” has occurred, and must be adjusted for. Whilst I understand the basic reason for this attitude; that certain minorities, as a result of discrimination, are less capable and less able to compete with white people even in fair tests, this is a dangerous and ultimately extremely condescending attitude.

At some point we must start treating minorities as competitive equals, and not as retarded children who have to be “included” for fear of a stomping tantrum. What Sotomayor was essentially abetting in her ruling on the case, and what the 4 dissenting Supreme Court judges were arguing for, is that black firemen at New Haven should be issued with different, easier tests to ensure that the outcome is racially proportional, and thus, politically acceptable. Sotomayor and the “liberal” judges want to solidify the notion that certain minorities cannot, and cannot be expected to compete on a level footing with the white majority in the foreseeable future. This, in no uncertain terms, makes them racists.

Blunting China's Sex-Craze

Just a quick update, China has decided to shut down public access to sexual health websites and any website which contains scientific information on sex or reproduction. This is part of its latest assault on "pornography", which China seems to really have a hard-on against.

"It is prohibited to spread pornographic content in the name of sex-related scientific research." The regulations say.

This is odd because normally Chinese authoritarianism is somewhat related to the pursuit of order and economic development. This, however, seems to be entirely motivated by massively dangerous priggishness, the type you wouldn't expect to see outside of a religious fundamentalist regime.

Luckily, it's part of China's "Green Dam" censorship software, which has already been defeated by diligent hacktivists, who've released "Green Tsunami".

A Trek To The Past: Tiananmen 1989

The comparisons between the protests now happening in Iran and the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre deserve a fuller recounting of what happened in China twenty years ago. The world was flush with democracy, hot off the heels of the Soviet Union's impending collapse. Chinese students and intellectuals were mourning the death of a democratically-inclined reformer Hu Yaobang. The mourning sparked off angry protests since prior to his death Yaobang had been disgraced and compelled to engage in a humiliating bout of "self-criticism" for his views.

The protests were huge, seeing over 1 million people in Tiananmen Square at one point, and happened over a long time period, starting in April and ending on June 4th. It was an enormous movement, and encompassed workers nation-wide as well as the middle classes thronging in Tiananmen Square. Everyone was convinced that the world was going to see the collapse of Chinese communism as well as Soviet communism that year. But they didn't. After prevaricating for a while and offering some cosmetic concessions and reforms, Jiang Zemin, the Chief of the Military, ordered the army to put down the revolt and "clear" Tiananmen Square by 6am on June 4th. They were done with 20 minutes to spare.

One of the most terrifying aspects of what the Chinese government did on June 4th, was and is the total censorship of any details pertaining to the protests. On June 4th 2007, the Chengdu Evening News printed a notice "Paying tribute to the strong-willed mothers of the June 4th victims". The government cracked down and three editors were sacked. What's most disturbing about this, though, is that the clerk who approved the notice only did so because he was totally unaware that anything significant had happened on June 4th, and assumed it was pertaining to some mining disaster.

I could go on to write a lof of stuff on how criminal any state control of information and congregation is, and how basic and essential freedom of information and the right to congregate are to human beings, but unsurprisingly, Star Trek: The Next Generation says it better: the renowned episode "The Best of Both Worlds", aired one year after the massacre in 1990, referenced "The USS Tiananmen Square" as one of the many Starfleet ships destroyed by the unstoppable Borg cube (read: unstoppable Chinese authoritarianism) at the famous Battle at Wolf 359. Awesome.

Something Long On Iran

Below is an extract from Roger Cohen's opinion piece in The New York Times, recounting his experience walking through Tehran during a recent anti-government protest.

"Can't the United Nations help us?" one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. "So," she said, "we are on our own."

Almost everyone has been following the unrest in Iran over the past few weeks. For those following it closely, it started with the pre-election hope that the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad might be supplanted by the slightly more moderate Mir Hussein Moussavi. As we know, that didn't happen, and Ahmedinejad claimed victory in a supposed landslide, defeating Moussavi by a wide margin across the country, even in Moussavi's own home town.

It was the brazen and condescendingly shoddy electoral fraud that sparked the protests, which began merely as demands for a recount, or at least some sort of accounting of the election. But the government decided to start a shoving match with its riot police and the Basij, unofficial paramilitary squads charged with either beating protesters or impersonating them to commit arson, creating an aura of chaos the government can capitalise on to justify the imposition of brutal order.

I think, if we're honest, most of us expected the Iranian "velvet revolution" to die down after a few days of student protest, defused by the conscientious government application of violence along with calls for compromise and moderation; the classic carrot-and-stick approach. But the protests have stretched and grown, and as pixelated images and feeds of protests keep surfacing, the drama, the stakes, and the potential of this uprising have persuaded a much larger audience than third-world unrest usually does.

A YouTube video surfaced yesterday showing an Iranian girl, shot in the heart, dying on the street, full of blood. It was obscene in both content and context, a click and a half away from the cutest Welsh Corgi taking a bath in a sink. It's upsetting and it should be; I'm glad that YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have become the most important outlets for information on the situation in Iran. The media have been calling it "citizen journalism", but that has too many connotations of amateurishness and unaccountability. They don't pretend to analyse, or present a whole, unbiased report of the situation. I think its function is more simply to witness, a globalisation of witnesses which enables us, however imperfectly, to draw a lens on events normally out of sight.

I'm glad that the uprising has achieved (and it is an achievement) so much international attention, because Iran should not be on its own. The impotence of the UN in the face of the quoted woman's appeal is intolerable. She believed that domestic injustice is an international affair, and she's right. There are no convincing arguments for the principle of non-intervention. There are costs, and risks of course. The international community should be wary of intervening in a crisis it doesn't understand, or where its intervention would be counterproductive.

But the international community also has a mandate to endeavour to understand foreign crises, and engineer interventions that aren't counterproductive. This is a moral mandate which overwhelmingly trumps the legal mandate not to intervene, solidified through centuries of moral barbarism and intellectual dishonesty. Conventions established when "racism" and "empire" were open adjuncts to "stability" and "empire" should have no hold over us today.

The Iranian uprising might or might not have its back broken by the state, still capable and possessed of a gnashing determination to survive. Either way, the rest of the world won't have helped much. It seems naive to even speak of a global will to intervene when Russia and China hasten to congratulate successful sham elections and militate against UN criticism of state brutality. But what this moment should tell us is that however foolish, risky or ingenuous speaking might be, there is yet something to speak of.

Spy Kids

The blogging must go on. Even though I am in Sri Lanka, where the heat directly affects the speed of the internet connection, if you turn on the air conditioner for 2 hours before hand, you can get about 20 minutes on the internet before it clogs up with moisture and jungle dust.

The CIA is probably known for more than it would like, as one of the more invasive and aggressive intelligence agencies. Indeed, outside of screaming patriots and fans of Matt Damon's work, the CIA is not too well-regarded. It's dramatic work, but ultimately sordid and underhanded, and deep down, we all know the real work of intelligence agencies doesn't involve buff ninjas humping their way to the truth. It's mostly corpulent computer experts trawling terabytes of email for words like "bomb" and "muslim".

But where the CIA cannot appeal to our intelligence, it appeals instead to our children. The CIA Kid's page proudly announces that "The CIA gathers intelligence in a variety of ways, not just by "spying", like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too)". It seems to me that spying, actually having agents intercept classified documents or infiltrate foreign governments, shouldn't really be something the USA, or any other country, lauds itself for. Certainly in diplomatic circles, there is a pleasant fiction that countries never spy on each other, and intelligence agencies are only there to take satellite photos and fight terrorism.

But having to tiptoe around the issue of spying on other governments is a good thing. It shows that we're still uncomfortable with the idea of spying, that we're a bit embarrassed about the prospect of openly admitting that it's done. Children shouldn't be reassured that there's nothing wrong with spying. Of course there is.